16 Ways To Find Out How Much Traffic a Blog Gets

There are numerous reasons you might want to find out how much traffic a blog gets. Perhaps you are interested in researching blogs that compete in the same niche as a website you own. Maybe you are considering starting a new blog, and you want to research the niche to see if there is enough interest in the topic for your new website to be viable. Perhaps you want to grow the traffic to a blog that you own. Maybe you’re curious about how much traffic some of the big media publishers’ websites get.

Whatever your reasons for wanting to find out traffic data, there are tools and resources available that can give you a general idea of a website’s metrics. Unless you own or manage the actual website, you’re probably not going to be able to pinpoint the visitor count or pageviews with certainty.

However, you can get an estimated idea of the site’s popularity overall.

Alexa.com tracks website visitor traffic rankings for many websites on the Internet. Their data is not completely accurate, because it involves flawed methodology. Alexa ranks websites based on how much traffic they get from users who have chosen to install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa toolbar users are a small minority of website users, which makes the data somewhat skewed. However, basic Alexa data is free to the public and easy to obtain, and it does give you insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Comscore publishes a number of different traffic reports. Their reports tend to cover only the largest publishers, and they include metrics by country for websites with the highest traffic numbers. This can be useful if you are interested in learning about how much traffic the most prominent websites on the Internet are generating.

This free resource gives you a bunch of data in one place, although some of it is inaccurate. You’ll be able to find out some basic Alexa rankings, keyword phrases the website is targeting, other websites targeting similar keyword phrases and websites with close relationships. If you’re researching smaller or newer websites, you might not get any results from this tool. The closely related websites report is flawed; in some cases it does find closely related sites, but in other cases the sites it shows are all unrelated.

SEMrush.com offers another paid service that’s useful for researching the traffic levels to competing websites. You can also use this service for finding information about your competitors’ paid ad campaigns and other details. You can read more on how I use SEMRush for finding traffic data.

Similarweb.com makes multiple services available. They offer both a free version and a pro version. Their pro service allows you to monitor competitors’ website traffic statistics. You can also get data about apps using the similarweb.com site.

Quantcast offers you a multiple opportunities to discover a website’s traffic measures. If you are interested in finding out metrics for your own website, you can subscribe to their services to receive detailed insights.

Quantcast also offers website owners the choice to make selected analytics data publicly available. Many website owners take advantage of this because they think it benefits them to show potential advertisers their site’s metrics as verified by an unbiased, trusted third-party source. So you can check to see if the website you are interested in researching has a public Quantcast profile available.

Similar to SEMRush, Searchmetrics will show you the organic search visibility for a website and also some of their top keyword terms.

11. Income and Traffic Reports

Some bloggers such as Pat Flynn and Matthew Woodward often share their traffic/income reports with their audience. So have a dig in their archives to see their traffic stats.

Of course some of these third party tools don’t have the full picture but they can really help give you a flavour of what is going on, this study by Moz has some useful insights on how these tools collect data and their accuracy.

Tools You Can Use on Your Own Blog

However, if you’re more interested in understanding your own blogs traffic a little better than these tools will be very useful.

If you’re interested in monitoring traffic counts to your own website, Google Analytics is one possible resource you could use for this purpose. Google Analytics is worth considering if you want a free solution and you don’t mind sharing all your data with the Internet’s monolithic ad-driven monopoly. If you want more control over your data and your site’s privacy, there are also some alternative options you could consider.

If you’re interested in monitoring traffic to your own website, Clicky offers both free and paid versions you might be interested in checking out. Clicky integrates with some of the data from Google Analytics, and this platform also gives you bunches of options that are not available through Google analytics. For example, Clicky offers you some detailed information about your website visitors. You’ll learn their usernames, locations, web hosting companies, web browsers, return visits and more.

Piwik is a free, open source analytics platform for monitoring traffic to your own website.

Piwik has some distinct advantages over Google Analytics and other third-party provided analytics platforms. The open source nature of the software allows you to retain complete control over your data without allowing a profit-motivated third party to have access to it.

There are some WordPress plugins available for use with Piwik, and there are also options for custom development.

If your blog or website is powered by the WordPress blog platform, you could use the Statpress plugin to monitor your traffic. Statpress gives you details about the visits to your website from both human visitors and ‘bots. Graphs are included to help you visualize your traffic patterns. You’ll be able to see your metrics for unique visitors, pageviews, ‘bot visits, and more.

Statpress also provides data about the latest hits to your website and where they came from. You’ll be able to access a list of the latest 500 keyword phrases that web searchers queried to find your website.

Statpress is a free, self-hosted plugin. You do not need a security key to use it. You retain control over your data when you use this plugin.

There have been multiple versions of Statpress released and maintained by different WordPress plugin developers. The link above takes you to the version that’s been most recently updated as of the time of this writing.

Woopra is a paid service offering customizable analytics for the purposes of discovering how much traffic goes to your own website and understanding your website’s customer base. Woopra can help you to develop individual profiles for every user who visits your site. They offer a free trial if you want to learn more.

In my experience so far, these resources have been the most helpful for determining the traffic to a website. You could use a combination of these resources to discover interesting insights about traffic data and metrics for many different websites or blogs on the Internet.

Have you used any additional resources for finding out how much traffic a website gets? If so, please share them in the comments. I welcome suggestions for other sources that would be good additions to this list.

Jamie

My name is Jamie Spencer and I have spent the past 5 years building money making blogs. After growing tired of the 9-5, commuting and never seeing my family I decided that I wanted to make some changes and launched my first blog. Since then I have launched lots of successful niche blogs and after selling my survivalist blog I decided to teach other people how to do the same.

Betty

I think Google Analytics Counter Tracker plugin on WordPress is one of the best you can use this days. It is very easy to use and it is compatible with almost every version of WordPress. You get detailed and concise analysis of your website guest and a graphical representation.

Muhammad Hamayun

I dont know how to use google anayltics. I already plugged in to my blog. It shows the traffic but every time its new. I just want to check that what is the overall traffic of my blog, like how much traffic I have so far from the start, not the new traffic only. If there is any solution to this please let me know.

Jamie

Posted at 20:16h, 07 September

If you just want an over view of your blog’s traffic then just go to audience and select overview. Then adjust the date range to an earlier date to get the traffic data from when you first started your blog.